


Return

by xaalenka



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:41:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22393441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaalenka/pseuds/xaalenka
Summary: A slice of the unfortunate life of Colum the Eighth.
Relationships: Colum Asht & Silas Octakiseron
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	Return

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything but original fiction and research papers for more than a decade, so please bear with me while I relearn how to play in somebody else's sandbox! 
> 
> It's safe to say I'll notice half a dozen errors the second I hit 'post,' so please assume I've already gone through the five stages of grief over any typos you spot.

“I bid you return. I bid. I bid. I bid.

“I beg you, return.” The plea was so soft the Necrolord God Himself couldn’t have heard it unless he’d had his ear to Silas’ lips.

And Colum Asht returned, wading and slogging and half-swimming against the cold current of the River. He came back to himself freezing and aching, surprised as he was every time that his lashes weren’t rimed with frost when he opened his eyes.

“Seventy-five point six seconds,” Silas said crisply, angling his wrist in Colum’s direction so he could see the little digital numbers. If Colum hadn’t known Silas all eleven years of the necromancer’s existence, he wouldn’t have noticed the tremor in those pale fingers, the too-sharp set of those white-clad shoulders. “I beg,” meant Silas had been afraid, even if only for a moment.

It was Colum’s job to make sure his uncle never needed to be afraid—it was what he’d been born and engineered for, before and (bloodily, painfully) after his emergence into the world—so back he came. Every time.

This time, Silas had drawn from him deeply, sending him so far into the washed-out realm of the River that he’d had to focus to maintain the link to his body. That deep, there were others to pick up his tether if he dropped it, so he didn’t. He was careful, but careful didn’t always equate to fast.

“I will do better, Uncle,” said Colum the Eighth.

It would be challenging to do better when pain spiraled behind each eye in the beginnings of a migraine and his throat still rasped uncomfortably from being intubated during his last treatment. Even more challenging when Silas insisted on pushing, always pushing the limits of his control and Colum’s endurance, catapulting Colum so far into the River he was in the water itself, not comparatively safe on the gray-white banks, but such was the life of a cavalier of the pious, prideful Eighth.

He would do better. For Silas.

His uncle lowered the wrist display and straightened the cuff of his robes with fastidious indifference. Silas was still a child, but when Colum had the energy to look with his own eyes instead of the eyes of a cavalier-slash-devotee-slash-battery, he caught glimpses of the man Silas would become, and those glimpses helped him hold onto love through his exhaustion.

“We will try again.” Silas’ tone made it an order, but his hesitation, watching for Colum’s acquiescence, held a question.

Hiding his weariness, Colum the Eighth inclined his head. “As you say, Uncle. I am ready.”

#

“Brother Asht, I bid you return!”

This time it was a clarion shout, gleaming and bright as Silas himself where it pierced the fabric separating the River from the world of the living. It called Colum back, and back he went, pulling one once-white boot at a time free of the sucking gray mud that lined the banks of the River. His limbs, though intangible, burned from the effort, but he would not slow. Not today.

Batting aside a questing tendril formed from an attenuated ulna whose naked end had been wheedled out into a death-dealing spike, Colum Asht heaved free of the River and into the rainbow-white light of life.

Even knowing what was at stake, his eyes focused first on his uncle’s face, checked first that Silas was whole and undamaged. Only then did Colum turn his gaze toward Brother Attva to learn their fate.

The templar eschewed technology of any kind and so had no wrist display to check, but he didn’t hesitate before raising his voice for the benefit of the white-robed crowd. “Fifty-seven point two seconds, and Brother Octakiseron met and exceeded the thanurgetic baseline.”

Colum didn’t sigh—he was too well-trained, even if he’d had breath to spare—but he allowed himself a long blink of relief. Silas was heir to the Eighth House; that was that. This test was to determine whether the bond between necromancer and cavalier had stood the test of time, whether Colum was to be cavalier primary after all, or whether it was back to the cloning board for the geneticists of the Eighth.

It was a relief for many, then, that they had passed.

Colum the Eight was thirty-two years old, but on days like this one, he felt eighty. He rubbed the bruised inside of his left elbow where the skin had been perforated by three dozen needles over the course of a week and counted the dull ache small price for the victorious set of Silas’ chin as he faced his House over Colum’s kneeling form.

There had been no hint of begging or of fear in Silas’s appeal today, but Colum had read it in his uncle’s white knuckles as he’d gripped the edge of their breakfast table that morning and in the almost tender way Silas had smoothed Colum’s ceremonial tabard before they entered the atrium.

His faith in his necromancer was as unshakable as his faith in the King Undying, and at that moment, Colum had just the right number of adrenaline-fueled sparks firing across his brain to think blasphemy be damned and mold his mouth into an unpracticed smile. These were the moments when Colum’s decades of dull pain and Silas’ increasingly unforgiving attitude were very nearly worth it.

Except that ‘it’ was going to be another ten or twenty years of service to his necromancer in white rooms and white halls, garbed and armored in white before he’d be buried. His coffin would be swathed in white, of course. The gray of the River was almost a respite, sometimes.

But Colum’s eyes drifted back up to his uncle, still haloed in golden light, and Colum told himself it was a blessing that the light had once been his.

#

It had occurred to Colum that his uncle was sometimes wrong, but not often and not in ways that left any lasting mark. Not, anyway, until they reached Canaan House. But then, observing seven other necro-and-cav pairs, Colum’s last two braincells heaved together and came to an unfortunate conclusion: the House of the Eighth, caught up in worship and achieving genetic perfection—perfection of the sort they found useful, anyway—had forgotten how to be human. And Silas, sharpest and brightest of their House, was therefore the least human of all.

Surrounded as Colum was by strangers and skeletons, the conclusion was not a comfortable one.

Colum decided it didn’t matter. He had followed and worshiped and guarded his uncle for two decades and he wasn’t going to stop now. It wasn’t that the moral implications were beyond his grasp, only that he was too drained to give them due weight.

When the Fifth were found crumpled and dead at the bottom of a hatch shaft he’d watched other pairs slink into but never descended himself until that night, Colum offered himself willingly for the siphon. The Fifth, he’d decided from his two-steps-back vantage, were the best of those gathered at Canaan House; not as flashy as the Third or as oiled-machine perfect as the Sixth, but the best human beings. Once the Ninth necromancer implied Silas’ attempts to investigate would be useless in the face of all that had already been done, Colum knew Silas was going to siphon his soul regardless of Colum’s thoughts on the matter. But Colum wanted to know what had happened to Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent, so for once Silas’ pride aligned with what was left of Colum’s empathy.

“Brother Colum?” It wasn’t a question.

“Ready, Brother Silas,” Colum replied anyway. Silas’ hand was heavy on his shoulder.

The drain hurt as it always had, the marrow-deep freeze catapulting him beyond the bonds of life and deep into the River.

Before Colum could regain his footing on the slick river bottom and brace against the hungry current, he became aware that he was not alone. Dozens of things—some still mostly human, some that had forgotten their original shapes entirely and banded together to form conglomerations with too many heads and limbs—shared the gray space with him, some pacing the banks restlessly, others convulsing through and beneath the glass-clear water.

Colum heaved to his feet and kept a tight mental hold on the line that bound him to his body. The too-human motion alerted some of the nearest things, which, sensing fresh life, began to close in.

Still the siphon went on, feeling as though someone had taken a sharp-edged spoon and started scooping out the contents of Colum’s skull. Under siege on two fronts, Colum drew his sodden leathers about himself, adjusted his stance, and raised his rapier.

Suddenly, but also a very long time later, the pain vanished, cut as though by a knife. Colum wavered, then steadied and finished bashing something with an inverted-skull body and five legs away from himself with his buckler. For an eternal moment, there was no call to return, neither a command nor a plea. That more than anything got Colum moving. Although the creatures of the River renewed their attacks as he began to walk with purpose, they were not enough to waylay him.

When the litany of “I bid,” turned to “I beg you, return,” Colum woke.

The agony of locked muscles and nuked neural pathways was nothing when he opened his eyes at last. They were in a different room—the dining hall—and there was blood on his uncle’s face. Not blood sweat; rather smears from a bloody nose and a growing bruise around his eye to show where someone’s massive fist had landed.

Something had transpired while Colum was away. This knowledge was reinforced when Silas didn’t wave a wrist device under his nose, merely said, “Fifteen minutes. You’re getting tardy.” And a moment later, when Colum had finished coughing, “You’re to duel the Seventh.”

Fifteen minutes. Longer than he had ever spent away from his body. There were monsters in the River, and the River raged beneath Canaan House like blood through a beating heart. It was possible, thought Colum the Eighth, that there were monsters on this side of the River as well.

It was also going to take him ages to get the bloodstains out of the front of Silas’ robes.

#

The man called Teacher was dead, and so were the Fourth and the Second. The necromancer Dueteros might not be gone yet, but she was as dead as any of them. So, oddly, was the Seventh cavalier, not to mention the Third. And something was badly wrong with the dangerous Third twin, now laughing and coughing by turns where she sat arched forward in a curve of live-wire pain so familiar Colum’s spine throbbed in sympathy.

Sympathy or no, Colum’s sword was in his hand before Ianthe Tridentarius finished her shriek of deranged laughter. Monsters indeed, and here, Colum knew, was one more.

He put two and two—or was it eight and eight?—together before Tridentarius finished speaking. Eight original necros and eight original cavs, but only eight Lyctors. It was Eighth necromancy taken to its extreme conclusion, and Colum couldn’t chase the fear from his eyes fast enough, so he closed them as his uncle prayed forgiveness from the King Undying.

Colum knew speaking was a mistake, but fear was in his mouth too as he said, “Silas—”

But Silas, afire with righteous rage, cut him off. “I will forgive you eventually, Colum, for assuming I would have been prey to this temptation. Do you believe me?”

No, Colum did not.

“I want to,” he said, and that was no lie. Colum wanted many things, but all of them involved turning back time a week, a year, a decade, and time was ticking forward instead, too fast for him to keep a hold on it. He was tired.

Then Silas Oktakiseron, adept and heir of the Eighth, condemned Ianthe Tridentarius to death. And as always, Colum Asht was the executor of his uncle’s decree, so when Silas said, “Show no mercy,” Colum flung himself at the girl without an ounce of hesitation.

She met him strength for strength, and though Colum was big and faster than his size hinted, though he had trained thirty years for a moment like this, he began to give ground. He knew what would happen if he failed, and he poured every iota of energy into delaying that inevitability.

When it came, Colum went as icy as if the siphon had already begun. He froze mid-swing and jerked away. He did not lower his defenses, physical or mental.

“Stop fighting me,” his uncle gritted.

And it was Colum who begged, audience be damned. “Don’t do it. Don’t put me under. Not this time.”

“Brother Asht,” said Silas Octakiseron, “if you cannot believe, then for God’s sake obey.”

The last of Colum’s love for the boy Si had been drained away with his soul as he offered himself to the siphon.

The River was cold and fast and teeming with dead things. Colum raised his shield in a desultory defense, but his rapier hung slack at his side. Silas was drawing deep and Colum’s ears rang with screams and the clatter of bones, though he wasn’t sure from which side of life the sounds came.

When Colum fell to his knees in a cruel mimicry of prayer, he did not bother to rise. Something advanced through the gray water, a twitching clump of bodies that moved like a glitch gone feral. It closed a hand around Colum’s tether...and he let go.

Somewhere too far away to matter, a voice berated him to listen, to obey, to return, but Colum Asht, at last, chose to rest.


End file.
